by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez
(Author’s Note: this short story is included in Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. Audio, then print versions follow)
Back home, he was sure he had been better, less confused.
Even now, standing at the head of the class, he frowned at the big map and tried to remember where he’d come from. The blue parts must be water. Everywhere else was a green so deep he fell into it and came out on his mountainside, the one back home, where he ran and climbed and wandered; where he could spend a morning eating mangoes until his face was sticky and spend an afternoon following a single ant as it meandered through the tall grass–
“Juan,” his teacher repeated. “Can you show us?”
A giggle rippled through the classroom. Juan liked hearing people laugh, even if sometimes they called him Bobo, like in all those fables. He liked listening to those stories. He liked listening to all the things he was supposed to have done, like he had lived so many lives. Juan blinked, seeing the map again. He dropped his hand and shrugged.
“Juan, where are you from?”
“Puerto Rico,” he said.
“Yes.” His teacher pointed at the map. “Porto Rico. Can you show us on the map?” The laughter was louder, this time.
Juan stood taller and shrugged again.
His teacher’s pale skin turned the color of hormiga brava. She glared at him, snatched her yardstick and snapped it against the map. “Do you even habla inglés?”
Juan felt a worm of fear wriggle into his gut. Pinned under her gaze, he nodded and sang what English he had learned from la missy back home:
Pollito, chicken
Gallina, hen
Lápiz, pencil
Y pluma, pen–
Mami came to get him after he spent the day in the corner. She took him home as fast as his legs could carry him. If he dragged his feet to stare at the airships floating as slow and serene as whales overhead, she tugged him forward until they reached their building.
She pushed him into the apartment and locked the door behind her. Before she left, Mami hissed they would settle things, don’t think she’d forget. The apartment grew dark as he waited for Mami to return. He lay back onto his cot and let his mind wander.
He told himself the story of How Juan Bobo Got To Be a Shut-in to remember, but wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Had it been yesterday? The day before? The old stories started with once upon a time, but Juan knew it didn’t mean things happened for certain. Things could have happened already, are yet to happen, or never happened at all. Maybe his story followed the same rules.
One of the trains on the Brooklyn Manhattan Transfer punched past outside, all vibration and the sound of a thousand scissors singing snickety-snack. It shredded his story to tatters, leaving behind silence and the musty smell of old plaster dust drifting down.
Juan jumped when Mami slammed the door behind her.
Her promise to settle things–forgotten until the moment she returned–crashed over Juan, and he froze, wary. She shrugged a load of clothes onto the back of her sewing chair before she disappeared into the room she shared with the other girls. She returned, having shed her street clothes and wearing her house slippers.
Juan closed his eyes, pretending he was asleep. He watched Mami as she stood over him, her face in shadows. Was she going to pull him out of bed and punish him like she’d promised? After a time, she turned away. She picked through the clothes she had brought from work. She shook out a skirt, and sank into her chair. She turned the fabric over in her hands before taking needle and thread to the tattered hem.
She hummed a meandering tune while she sewed. Juan’s eyelids grew heavy, every blink stretching out into what seemed forever, the fluid loop of once upon a time. Adrift, adrift in the gray place between sleeping and waking, between now, then and what’s-to-be, Mami sewing in her chair an island of light in the distance.
Juan dreamed, or thought he dreamed, of being back home.
He laughed, running alongside Abuela’s three-legged pot bouncing along the road. Mami had sent him to fetch it. When he got to his grandmother’s house, she urged him to carry it lest it get dented. Juan had good reason not to follow her wishes: the pot was as black and heavy as unconfessed sins.
“Here.” Abuela had pressed her gnarled hand into Juan’s and slipped him a paper cone full of gofio to sweeten the deal. The powdery combination of toasted cornmeal and brown sugar set Juan’s mouth a-water. “I know it’s your favorite,” she had said, and her dark face crinkled into a sly smile. She knew the way to keep Juan’s attention was through his sweet tooth.
He had been dutiful, oh, how dutiful he had been!
Now, he trudged along, blowing droplets of sweat out of his eyes, the sweetness on his lips long forgotten. The pot felt heavier than before, no matter how many times he shifted it from one aching shoulder to the other.
Then he noticed its three legs.
“You might’ve fooled Abuela, but not me,” he grunted as he set the pot down. “Get going, lazybones! You can use your legs to walk the rest of the way.”
The pot did not budge.
“Go!” Juan shouted at it, but it wasn’t until he kicked it and sent it rolling along that it moved. All it had needed was the right motivation.
Now, he clapped his hands in rhythm with its hollow clangs, the black iron of the pot dull with the dust of the road. The clangor reminded him of the rolling beats of Papi’s drums: trucu tác u-tác! Juan sang, weaving the beat between the ringing of the pot and the slap of his feet on the road.
Lola se murió,
Lola, lo lamento;
Mento, mentosán;
San, San Germán. . .
He ran, the grass-green of the cane fields on his right, the blood-red clay of the road stretching away before him, and the deeper green of the mountains stretching away towards the sky on his left. The air was full of the buzzing of mosquitos and the sweet, rancid smell of sugar cane left too long in the sun.
Then, the mountains spoke.
They rose, green and huge as the swelling waves in the deep, deep sea, frozen as they scratched the underbellies of rainclouds. The voices of the mountains rolled out of the forests, full of the rumble of faraway thunder and the whispers of leaves moving with the wind.
Does your Mami know where you’re going, Juan?
Juan started to answer but spluttered as the first fat drops of rain stung his cheeks. Quick as a slap, he came out of his reverie. The pot had rolled to a stop in the road ahead, the rain pattering around it. The dust of the road, soon to be mud, would leave stains dark as blood on his clothes.
Imagining the look Mami would give him if he returned to the house covered in mud, he peeled off his clothes. He folded them into a bundle under his arm. Ahead, the downpour hissed towards him, driving the voice of the mountains before it.
Does your Mami know you’re wearing your Sunday best?
No, he wanted to say, that’s not true–but who could argue with the mountains? When he proffered his bundle of homespun clothes as proof, they had disappeared from under his arm. He looked under each arm, to be sure, muttering donde estás. He was wearing a motley, the crackling red of end-of-harvest cane fire on his right, the black of charred fields on his left.
The rain stopped.
A coqui made a single tentative peep, swallowed by the night. The smell of rain, clean and sharp as a knife, mingled with the flat musk of wet earth.
A low thrum in the air made Juan shiver, and he felt something slither loose, deep in his belly. He choked back loops and loops of crowing laughter, knowing once he started he could not stop. No one could, not Abuela, not Mami. No, it was time to go, to get back home, to let Mami make things better again.
When he turned to kick the pot again, an old jibaro stood in its place, his skin dark and dusty as black iron.
“Enough.” The old man raised his hands in surrender. Old cast iron shears, machete blades and crooked skewers fell to land in the red mud at his feet, as if he had them all hidden in his sleeves. “No more kicking. You found my hideout, Echu. I give up.”
Juan felt a flutter of–what?
Recognition? How? He had no memory of the old man.
Was he feeling confused again? Had this happened on the island, on its mountains and red clay paths, or before then, when it was once upon a time? The paths had become all tangled, blended together so they all looked alike. Juan shook his head, but if he squinted, the old man looked like Abuela. Was he her brother?
“You hear me, Echu?”
“I’m Juan.”
“Sí, Pepe,” the old man said, and nodded with pursed lips. “C’mon, this is Tío Oggy you’re talking to.” His face crinkled into a wry grin and he raised one foot towards Juan. “Go ahead, pull the other one.”
“I’m not Pepe, either.” Juan patted his chest and repeated himself, louder and slower, “I told you already–I’m Juan.”
Oggy scoffed but leaned in and squinted into Juan’s eyes–first one, then the other, as if he expected to see something there. When he was done, he grimaced and spat on the side of the road.
“That’s the best trick you ever pulled.” The jibaro chuckled, but the dull red of hot iron glowed through his skin. When he spoke again, wisps of acrid smoke curled out of his mouth. “How’d you hide from yourself?”
So many questions! His chest burned with their heat, thronging in his throat, but not one of them scrabbling past the others to be uttered. It would be like the thin spray of a leak before the flood, and like the laughing spell he had tamped down, he wasn’t sure he could stop himself.
Instead, Juan shook his head and shrugged.
“She really did it.” Oggy murmured, and Juan wondered if the old man was talking to him. “Snipped and tucked you away, tight as a pocket.”
Juan wanted to know who had done the sewing, but he fell silent when the townspeople stepped out onto the road. They slipped out of the cane fields like phantoms, and each knelt to take one of the sharp irons from the mud. More people stepped out of the trees and long grass on his left. Juan recognized his teacher and the sugar mill’s majordomo Don Peyo, their faces slack. They hissed accusations at each other from their ragged lines, a small town’s old hurts and petty squabbles ripped open, bleeding poisoned words until one by one they fell silent, staring at Juan.
“He’s red,” the people to his right murmured.
“No, he’s black,” the people on his left growled.
They leapt at each other, shrieking, rusted iron stabbing–
Juan lurched awake to the snickety-snack of the el-train rumbling past. In its wake, the latest Johnny Rodríguez song wafted through the vents from the neighbor’s apartment. It was the closest Mami and the other girls got to owning a radio.
Mami sat in her chair, humming, her hands moving needle and thread. The rest of the apartment was dark, still, the girls long since gone to their shifts at the shirt factory. The collection of blouses and skirts Mami had brought draped the arms of her chair in a tidy stack.
She stopped humming when she felt Juan slip out of bed.
“Johnny,” she said, voice low. She frowned at the stitch she worked on, pulled it tight. “What are you doing awake?”
“No pude–” Juan flinched at Mami’s hiss. He switched to his halting English. “I could not–sleeping? No. I could not sleep?”
Mami’s eyes flashed in the low light, but she softened after a moment, waved him closer. When Juan tried to clamber into her lap, she set her sewing aside and murmured, wasn’t he too grandesito for his Mami’s lap? She relented, and he put his ear to her chest. He could feel Mami’s hum through one ear and hear the music with his other.
“Ay, Johnny.” Her sigh trailed off into nothing. Juan waited for her to settle things like she’d promised, or to tell him again how important speaking English was to fit in with things here. Instead, she stroked his head before she took up her sewing again.
“A bad dream.” Juan shuddered. “What made me awake.”
Mami made a small noise.
She folded the fabric of the skirt once, then once again as she pushed the needle through, pulled the thread taut as she finished the hem. Light flashed off the needle as she closed the stitch, but Juan gasped when Mami drew out her shears to snip the thread.
“What’s the matter?” Mami tucked the needle into her sleeve, thread trailing. She shushed him as she brushed the skirt and folded it.
“Why do you do it, Mami?”
“The extra work?”
“No.” He pinched his fingers as if holding a needle and rolled his wrist, mimicking Mami’s movements. “What’s the word for coser?”
“Sewing.”
Juan nodded. “Why do you like sewing?”
“It’s extra money.” Mami shrugged. “I like it.”
“Why do you like it so much?”
“Aren’t you full of questions tonight?” She patted the finished skirt, set it aside, and peeled a shirt off her chair arm. “It’s a good one, though.”
Mami found the mark of tailor’s chalk on a torn underarm seam. She pulled swatches out of her pockets, comparing colors against the fabric until she found a close enough match.
“Making old clothes new again is an old magic. It lets people tell the world new stories about themselves. You can almost be someone new if you’re wearing new clothes.”
“Did you,” Juan said after a long moment, “ever make me clothes, all red on one side, black on the other?”
Her hands froze mid-stitch.
“Mami?”
“Time for bed, Johnny.”
Juan shrank away from the tone of her voice. It was Mami’s Nueba Yores voice, where the chill of the air, the hardness of the concrete had seeped into her words. She had used it when she found him playing on the corner with the other children. Come out of the sun, mijo–you want to look like some burnt up thing?
Juan didn’t understand why staying out of the sun was important to Mami when she was as brown as he was, but he stayed inside to be her good boy. Now, he looked yellow. If Abuela saw him this way, she would give him spoonful after spoonful of cod liver oil, convinced he was sick.
Silence stretched to fill the air until Juan slipped off Mami’s lap. He climbed back into his bed, turned to face the wall. Mami stood, stretched, and turned out the light.
“Johnny?” Her voice was low, tentative. “Where did you see those clothes?”
“I must have dreamed it,” Juan said after a moment before turning in the dark to face the wall. He lay awake a long time after Mami had gone to sleep.
#
The story of How Juan Bobo Almost Fed His Sweet Tooth started the next day. He woke to Mami bustling out the door to work, past the other girls who lived in the apartment. Maggie and Alex chattered and joked with Juan while he searched the kitchen for something sweet. The empty sugar jar reminded him that Mami and the girls couldn’t always fill it. Another difference between this place and back home.
He wished he could go out and get some sugar at the corner store, but Mami didn’t want him outside and the girls knew it. They leaned against the end of the kitchen counter, sharing a cigarette as they played briscas. They gossiped in low voices while they took turns tossing cards into the pot until one of them scored the trick. Juan flounced back to bed and lay there until Alex and Maggie stubbed out their last cigarette and, yawning, disappeared into the next room.
Alex always called him Juancho, Maggie played rhyming games, and–best of all–both of them spoke Spanish with him. They had been the ones who had told him his Papi was off in the war fighting the animales.
For days, Juan’s head had danced with visions of lion warriors, elephant generals, monkey spies, and his father standing tall against every one of them. Papi’s black skin gleamed with sweat as he held his pistol in one hand, his machete in the other, and held off the vicious enemy.
When Juan asked Mami how the army Papá fought against held their weapons–didn’t the animales have paws?
She corrected him.
“Not animales, Johnny.” Her smile trembled and didn’t light up her eyes. “Alemanes. Germans. Soldiers from far away.”
His vision, which had transformed into Papi surrounded by enemy soldiers, lost its luster. In its place, he felt hollow and afraid he might never see his father again.
Now, in the apartment, Juan froze, his hand in the breadbox. Had he heard one of the girls stir in the next room? After a moment of silence, he moved his hand and felt the edge of a silver dollar Mami had hidden in there. He pocketed the money, took the spare key and slipped out the door.
He took the stairs down and stepped out of the building into the barrio. The calls of hawkers filled the cool morning air with Spanish and English, drowned out by the sound of a streetcar zipping past, ringing its bell, trailing sparks.
Juan followed a crowd of people. He started to cross the street with them, but stopped short staring at a zeppelin crossing overhead, silent and enormous as a thundercloud.
“¿Tú ‘tas loco?” Rough hands fell upon him, yanked him to the curb in one long frog march step. Juan blinked at the old man’s skin, black as an old three-legged pot. “Muchacho, didn’t your Mami teach you sense? You can’t just stand on the street eslembao like that.”
“Oggy,” Juan said. He was glad to recognize someone in this place. “How’d you get here? Things get bad back home for you, too?”
“Oggy?” The old man looked confused a moment, but then winked and gave him a sly smile. “Si, Pepe. Go ahead and pull the other one.”
“Not Pepe, remember?” Juan knew this game. “Juan–or Johnny if you don’t want to get in trouble with my Mami, too.”
“Speaking of–” Oggy snapped his fingers. “Where’s your Mami, kid? She know you’re out of school?”
“Yeah,” Juan said. “She’s the one who talked to my teacher about not going back.”
Oggy pursed his lips and started to step away when Juan dug into his pocket and pulled out the silver dollar.
“She gave me this.” Juan brandished the coin. Oggy stopped mid-step, his gaze so fixed on the coin, Juan put it back in his pocket. “She said to buy her something sweet.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Oggy tilted his head so Juan would follow him. “I know just the place.”
Oggy urged him to go inside when they got to the store. The old man had made Juan’s mouth water with his descriptions of the sweets inside. It was the best place in the barrio, Oggy told him, but when Juan set foot inside the owner shooed him out. In between scolding him, he repeated, “school, school” until Juan backed out of the store.
“What do ants care if I get some candy?”
“Ants?” Oggy looked confused.
“Sí. He said the true ants didn’t want me in there.”
“Doesn’t seem fair.” Oggy shook his head along with Juan. He stopped, and a smile spread across Oggy’s face. “I know! If I act like your Papá, he’ll let me inside and I’ll get what you want. Just tell me what sweets you want.”
Oggy held out his open hand.
Juan felt a sudden prickling of doubt. He should close his fist around the silver dollar and slip it back into his pocket, go back home and put it back where he found it.
“C’mon, muchacho.” Oggy flapped his hand. “Think about how happy your Mami will be that you thought of her! I’m sure she’ll share with you.”
Juan imagined Mami smiling at him like she used to do so often back home, and the glow of pleasure made him forget he had made up the story about Mami wanting sweets in the first place. He planted the coin in Oggy’s palm.
“Wait for me here.”
He did. His mouth watered as he kept imagining how the sweetness would weigh on his tongue. Soon he would get gofio or a pilón lollipop encrusted with sesame seeds.
Where was Oggy?
The shadows had lengthened by the time Juan worked up his nerve enough to go inside again. The shop owner glanced at him before he returned to reading his newspaper. Juan peered down the handful of aisles, and once again because he sometimes missed things the first time.
Oggy wasn’t in the store.
Juan felt a pang of fear. He had lost the Mami’s money, and he didn’t even have any sweets to offer her as a trade. He raced back home, trying to beat Mami back home.
It didn’t work.
When he cracked the door open, Mami raised her gaze from Alex and Maggie. Her glare drew him into the apartment. He saw the girls’ wide-eyed faces for an instant before they scurried past him and out into the hallway.
“Close the door.” Mami’s voice was cold, calm.
Juan froze.
“Johnny!” Mami barked, making him jump. “What did I tell you?” Mami’s voice was low again, trembling with anger. Juan leaned against the door to shut it, afraid to look away. Mami had never hit him, but he was afraid she might now.
“Why?”
Juan felt his face burn with the shame of not being the good boy his Mami wanted. He tried to think about the why of things, but it retreated into the same place once upon time lived in his thoughts, left no reasons in its wake.
He stared at his hands, his feet, and shrugged.
“Fine.” Mami bit off the end of the word and put her hand out, palm up. “The girls told me you took their money, but I made sure they knew my Juan is no thief.”
The heat drained away, left Juan cold. He blinked at Mami’s empty hand. He wanted to say something, anything.
“Johnny.” She waggled her fingers under his nose. “Give it back.”
Juan stared at her hand. It filled his entire world.
“I don’t have it.”
Mami set her jaw.
“H-he promised, Mami–!” Juan started to tell her about how Oggy had agreed to buy him candy, but as soon as he mentioned Tío Oggy his mother cut him off.
“Not another one of your stories–!” Mami pressed her lips together as if to hold back the rush of words. She sighed, said, “I’ll have to pay them back for what you did. Money I’d just made last night–” She stopped, raised a hand to her mouth.
She pinched her lips closed, like closing a coin purse, and shook her head. She reached into her pocket and pressed a silver dollar into Juan’s hand. He stared at the coin, still warm from Mami’s hand.
“You,” Mami said, “will be who gives this back to them. Let’s see how you feel when you see their disappointment in you. But be sure to say you’re sorry.”
Later, after the girls left, Mami asked him what had happened. He told her about meeting Tío Oggy, how he had promised Juan he would buy the sweets for his Mami, but had disappeared instead.
Mami bowed her head and sighed. She was in her chair, the light of the lamp at her back. When she spoke, her face was in shadow.
“I want what’s best for you, mi amor.” She murmured, her voice hollow. “Your father too–he wanted more than just cutting caña until you’re old and bent, with nothing to show for it but scars on your hands.”
She stared at the doorway to the bedroom. Juan’s eyes sought hers, wanting her back from wherever memory had taken her.
“Why did you want something sweet?”
“I miss Abuela’s gofio.” He had almost told her about the dream, the sweetness so heavy on his tongue he woke up craving it.
A ghost of a smile flickered across Mami’s face. She stood, gestured for Juan to sit at the tiny kitchen table. When he did, she had already taken out a pan, and the bottle of milk from the icebox. She poured milk into the pan and set it on a low flame on the stove. Once the milk simmered, she stooped to grab a fistful of rice, tossed it into the pan. She stirred it until she turned down the heat and poured out the rice soup into a bowl.
“Here,” she said and slid it across the table, the steam caressing Juan’s face. “Like Abuela liked to say, barriga llena–“
“–corazón contento,” Juan finished the phrase, nodding at the wisdom. Often, he was happier after he ate. He took the spoon Mami handed him. He slurped at the steaming rice, remembering how Abuela liked to make this when she could get the rice she needed for it.
Between Mami standing behind him, stroking his hair, singing a meandering tune, and the warmth of the rice soup pooled in his belly, Juan felt today soothed away, smoothed away until he felt his eyelids grow heavy.
#
How Juan Took His Piglet to Church began when he had taken his beloved Chencha wrapped in swaddling clothes to the chapel up in the mountains back home.
The folks from town called it Monte Arriba because of the long climb to get there, but the jibaros in the mountains called the tiny church the Chapel of Tides because it came and went–sometimes there, but gone others. Everyone agreed it lay at the center of a once upon a time place.
Yellow green palm leaves woven into a cross hung from the rusted zinc roof, and Juan crossed himself like he’d been taught was proper. The green slopes of the surrounding mountains rose through the low-hanging clouds.
Mami had told Juan the family was going hungry. She told him to bring Chencha out of her pen. Juan knew what would happen next, and how he had cried!
After a full day, and half of the next, of Juan howling and drumming his heels against the floorboards, Mami snapped. The day she would go hungry, she said, was the day Chencha would be baptized.
Juan knew what he had to do.
Now, Juan bowed his head as he stepped under the eaves, cradling his piglet. Chencha was heavy as a stone in his arms, and she snored, but he loved her. She pranced and wagged her scraggly root of a tail when he came near, so Juan knew she loved him back.
He looked for the washbasin the priest used as a font. A quick splash was all Juan needed to save his piglet from becoming tomorrow’s feast, then back before sundown. A small sound made Juan peek farther into the Chapel.
A woman in white sat on the lone pew, her back to him. Her shoulders shook with quiet sobs, her hands folded together and pleading to the cross painted on the far wall, behind the altar.
Shelves flanked the cross, filled with clusters of flickering candles and the chipped statues of saints. The sorrowful, pained eyes of the icons gleamed in the candlelight.
A gust of wind slammed the door closed behind Juan, buffeted the Chapel. The wooden slats creaked, and the small building shuddered and rolled like a ship at sea. Chencha squealed awake and squirmed out of Juan’s arms. She trotted down the aisle, towards the altar, dragging her swaddling behind her.
He cried out after Chencha, but the Chapel pitched forward after another gust. Out the tiny window, the green slopes of the mountains moved like gigantic swells trailing salt spray behind them. In the distance, the mountains grew more narrow, lights twinkling along their sides like rows of windows, and the low oblong shape of an airship hung low in the sky. Was this the steamer he had taken with Mami to Nueba Yor, or was it another ship, from further back, from before they got to their island all those years ago?
A memory bubbled up, of being carried through the green peaks and valleys of the deep, deep sea. Squeezed down to fit, surrounded by shit and fear and death. The muted ting-ting of black iron chains, wailing in the dark belly of a ship. Carried, carried across the face of the compass rose.
Back in the Chapel, the woman in white keened over the sound of the wind. She moaned and rocked, cradling a bundle in her arms. She repeated “se lo han llevao, why did you take him?” When he drew closer, Juan noticed it had been Mami all the while. He had not noticed it before. Maybe it was the magic thrumming through every board of the place, or maybe he had never seen his mother this sad.
“Don’t be sad, Mami.”
She could not hear him. Juan wasn’t sure if it was over the full throat of the wind, over the creaking sounds of the Chapel moving like a galleon over the swells, or because he was now a phantom, a dream-self.
Mami whispered, “They took him,” and looked up at the wall of saints. “One of your own,” she said, her gaze darting from one porcelain face to another. Their collected eyes looked away, upward. Juan peered over her shoulder.
He had thought she had Chencha, once again wrapped tight in her swaddling, but instead it looked like a stone. When he blinked, he realized it was fire-hardened clay, black and rounded as a river stone on one side, the bright red of fresh blood on the other. It had cowrie shells for eyes, a mouth.
Was he feeling confused again?
Juan knew he was both the clay baby in Mami’s arms and himself floating over her shoulder. He knew it the same way old stories and dreams feel like slipping on familiar clothes after visiting and revisiting them.
Mami stroked the curved surface of the clay baby.
Something vast moved behind the wall of saints.
He felt it like an indrawn breath, or a sudden gust of wind laden with the taste of rain upon it. Its gaze moved over him, the cloud of a thunderstorm sliding over rolling hills. It peered out at them through the eyes of the saints on the wall, each of them a mask through which it watched the world.
“I’ll hide him, sewn up. Safe as God’s own pocket.” Mami leaned forward, a quavering smile on her lips. “Please.”
The Chapel groaned, tilted, a ship climbing the face of a wave. Outside, skyscrapers squeezed between the mountains, lights glimmering like sprays of seaward stars. Mami cocked her head, as if listening to a whisper. Her face beamed her thanks and she rocked back to sag against the pew. She murmured her thanks over and over while her hands moved. Juan watched in horror as she drew out her shears and cut a Juan-shaped hole in the air around the stone. What was left in its wake was a simple doll-shape. She drew the shimmering cloth over the seashell eyes. She set aside the shears, blades stained red, smoothed out wrinkles. With a long needle, she started stitching.
He saw the needle flash, felt stitches tighten at the nape of his neck, and–
He thrashed awake. The snickety-snack of the train, a soothing lullaby. Mami stood at the washbasin in the kitchen, the gray light of dawn all around her. He panted, shuddering as the last shreds of the dream faded. The green hills of home a knife of yearning piercing his heart.
Mami sang in a low voice, washing dishes. Her song lulled him, his eyelids heavy. It had been a dream, nothing more, nothing less.
She slipped her shears a-drip with blood into her apron pocket. Sleep fled. Juan clamped both hands over his mouth to keep a scream from clawing its way out.
Mami stopped.
She turned her ear, and Juan saw her face in profile. He willed his limbs to ease back into bed and closed his eyes as if asleep. Juan didn’t dare open his eyes because Mami might be standing over his bed, watching him.
He jolted awake when the door snicked closed.
Had it all been a dream? Had it happened? Juan shook his head. Why had she done–what? Cut him down to size? Was he some kind of cloth Mami was ready to sew?
In none of the Juan Bobo stories he had told himself had Mami ever wanted to hurt him. In every one of the stories, she loved him just the way he was. Was he feeling confused again?
Back home, whenever he had felt like this, he would have run off into el monte. He would have tramped up and down back trails, surrounded by the green hum of living things, to help him think. Here, his thoughts were the dull gray of concrete and steel.
He had to go, even if it meant defying Mami again, somewhere green with trees and grass and maybe the chuckle of water, trickling somewhere unseen.
After he left the building, Juan wandered the streets of el barrio asking for directions to someplace with trees. By mid-day, he caught a glimpse of treetops overhanging stone walls, but even though his feet ached and his stomach felt like it flapped against his ribs, he felt renewed by the faint smells of loam and water and green leaves.
A sign hung next to the entrance to the park:
NO
PORTO RICAN
GODS
ALLOWED
Juan blinked, clenched his brow while he mouthed the English words over and over. His head hurt trying to understand, but he shrugged his doubt off and entered the park. In the distance, people walked on the arch of a bridge crossing a stream, wearing fancy clothes and tossing crumbs to the swans. The low burble of the stream called to Juan, the sigh of a breeze ruffling his hair.
A whistle pierced his calm and he turned.
“Mano, pa’ dónde va?” Oggy stared at him. “Where you think you’re going? Didn’t you see the sign?”
Oggy tried to grab him by the arm, but Juan danced back.
“Leave me alone.” He glared at Oggy, Mami’s words still a fresh hurt. He wanted to scold Oggy for taking his money, but Mami didn’t like him lying, either. “You took the money I gave you.”
“Sure.” Oggy looked like he’d bit into something bitter and ducked his head in a half-nod. “If that’s what it takes to keep you out of the park.”
Juan felt an odd vertigo as he said, “No.”
He turned away, walked farther into the park, breathing the smell of dirt and green living things. Ardillas bounded off the cobbled path, and one chattered at him from its perch in a tree, its bristling tail twitching. Juan remembered ardillas back home were fierce and brown furred and snake eaters.
Mami told him the right word for those was mongoose.
He felt the old confusion cloud his mind, and he sank onto one of the many benches lining the path until the feeling passed. Who was shouting?
“Vamo muchacho!” Oggy dashed forward, his furtive movements like the squirrels’. “Let’s go before there’s trouble.”
People from el barrio crowded at the entrance of the park. Some pointed and cast dark looks their way, and Juan waved at them, gestured them closer. Why didn’t they want to sit on the benches and enjoy the shade like him?
“Come on,” Oggy said. “If you follow me, I promise to get you some sweets.”
Juan clicked his tongue, shook his head. No, he had wanted some quiet time under the branches of a tree like back home. No longer–first Oggy, now this crowd, and those distant cries–who was shouting?
Two police officers trotted across the grass, clubs in hand. They made sweeping gestures as they approached, the way Juan shooed away his little Chencha when she was in his way. On the bridge, more people in fine clothes gathered, watching. The way they moved reminded him of when officers came looking for Papi back home, after what happened at the sugar mill. Papi had turned, told him to run even as he stood blocking the door.
“No!”
Oggy stepped between them and Juan, hands together in supplication. The officers shouted in an English broken in ways Juan didn’t recognize. He stared at their skin–more pale than his–and orange hair, and wondered if it affected how they spoke English. How they swung their clubs at Oggy made it clear what their words meant.
Oggy blocked their way to Juan, holding his arms out even as one of the officers swung his club. Juan cried out, sprang up to pull Oggy away. They fell back, a jumble of limbs. When he saw blood running down half of Oggy’s face, he shouted for help. One of the policemen pried him off, wailing, and swung his club at him. Juan scrambled back, ran towards the crowd.
The gathered people from el barrio had spilled into the park. Some of them shouted to the others, do something, lo están matando! Others said nothing, or muttered there will be trouble for everyone. He recognized one voice.
“Let me through!”
How could Mami be here? She should be at work, right? No, he heard her shout his name. “Johnny, mijo, come here.” She reached through the crowd.
He glanced back at Oggy, held up between the two policemen with blood streaming from his scalp. Juan clutched at Mami’s hand, and she pulled him through the crowd. Once out, she turned, eyes blazing.
“May this be the last time,” she spat through gritted teeth. Her hand flashed out and slapped him on the face before she crushed him to her and sobbed.
#
Back at the apartment, Alex and Maggie had felt the long, tense silence loom over them and left earlier than usual. Each smiled at Juan when Mami was looking the other way.
She had yanked his arm all the way back from the park, snapping him forward step by step. Juan had stopped when he saw the warning sign again, its block letters shouting:
NO
PORTO RICANS
DOGS
ALLOWED
Juan blinked at the words, mouthed them again, but Mami tugged him along in her wake. He craned his neck to keep looking at the sign as he stumbled behind his mother.
Back in the apartment, he touched his cheek. The sting of Mami’s hand–light and dry against his skin–lingered. She took a long breath, smoothed back her hair.
“Juan,” she said. He blinked, surprised. She had insisted on calling him Johnny ever since they got here. “Things can’t go on like this. Do you know how much you scared me?”
Juan stared at his hands.
“I just–” Mami murmured. “Why can’t you mind what you’re told?”
“Mami, I–“
“I don’t want to hear about it–!” She slammed her hand on the kitchen table, but bit back whatever else she had meant to say. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, mijo. Forgive me, but I’m so–angry.”
Juan dropped his gaze, cheeks ablaze, lips quivering.
“No!” Mami rushed forward, kneeling to take his hands. “Not at you, mi amor.” A ghost of a smile softened her face. “We–your father and I–had hoped this place would be a better place for you, just like in the stories.”
Juan knew all about the stories he loved best. They began, “once upon a time,” but they could happen whenever–yesterday, a hundred years ago, or not yet. Mami’s “once upon a time” had been this place, Nueba Yor. Did Papá think the same?
“Was this before Papi had to go prove he was brave?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Brave. The police came for him.”
“¿Y qué pasó?” Mami shot him a look, and Juan ducked his head. “I mean, ‘what happened next?'”
“They made him choose.” Mami scoffed, a grim smile pressing her lips together. “He had the freedom to choose between Sing Sing, or going into the Army.”
Juan squeezed Mami’s hand.
“I couldn’t let that happen to you, too.” She raised a hand to cup his cheek in her palm. “I want you to be safe, stay safe, fit in.”
Juan felt the dizzying dream-sense of being in his body while also watching himself far away through a velvet tunnel. His ragged edges fluttered in the wind between who he had been and who he was, now.
“Safe?”
“Your Abuela has a favorite saying: vestir un santo con el saco del otro. I didn’t know I could do it, Johnny, but I had to try.”
Dressing one saint with the other’s clothes?
“I saw you, Mami.” Juan shuddered with the effort of dragging the memory to light. “In the chapel back home. After, too. Is that why Oggy was in the park?”
“Stop it, Johnny.” Mami’s face hardened. “Dreams are just that–dreams.”
“He called me Echu,” Juan said. Was he talking too fast? “He laughed at me, hiding behind new clothes–“
“The old man in the park? Look what all his nonsense got him. Is that what you want?”
Juan opened his mouth, closed it without saying anything.
“Is it?” Mami’s voice lashed him, her eyes gleamed like wounds. “Tell me. Is that what you want to happen?”
Juan shook his head, murmured no.
“Then help me, mi amor.” Mami put her arms around him, pressed him to her. He stiffened before he let her enfold him into her embrace. “Help me keep you as safe as being in God’s own pocket.”
Juan made a small sound of assent. He trusted her to keep him safe, but the cost of living in a place like “once upon a time” was not being tied to any time at all. There was no before, only a now and the happily-ever-after, which is to come.
Juan wasn’t the only one who wanted to fit in. Like a child’s game, every person dared others to snip away threads to who they were before. Folded, then once again, until it was hidden from view, even their own. He felt the old, familiar confusion lift as the song of a thousand scissors singing snickety-snack filled his ears.
#
Juan walked to school, let the sounds of el barrio wash over him. English, Spanish tangled in the air, became something new, something different. The streetcar zipped past, trailing sparks, filling his nose with the acrid smell of ozone. Once it was gone, the slow simmer of old food rotting in the gutters enveloped him.
Airships floated overhead, under steel colored clouds.
The gray peaks of skyscrapers rose like mountains, not yet crowned by mist or thunder. If he looked out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw mountains, hazy with distance. Every time he repeated his story to himself, they grew sharper, greener, until one day the skyscrapers would become the mountains back home. He started the story again, from the beginning.
Once upon a time, Juan Bobo got to los Nueba Yores, and was sure he had been better back home. He was convinced he had been better, less confused. Juan knew–other people called him Bobo, just like in the stories. This confused him even more, because he dreamed of a time when he had yet another name, but not today.
He repeated it until the story flowed seamless, without a hitch.
No Comments